FE-to-SPH Approach Applied to the Analysis of Soft Body Impact: Bird Strike and Hail Impact

The soft body impact might be considered as one of the greatest problems for aeronautical structure. To numerically investigate this kind of events both Lagrangian and Smoothed Particles Hydrodynamics (SPH) approaches are generally adopted, but both of them suffer some problems concerning distortion, in Lagrangian elements, and the treatment of essential boundary condition, for SPH approach. The possibility to apply a finite element to SPH transition (FEtoSPH) is here considered. A numerical investigation on hail impact and bird strike phenomenon was performed at the Laboratory for the Safety in Transports (LaST) of Politecnico di Milano. Each of these three approaches was considered for different mesh definitions and impact velocities. A case study concerning the hail impact against an engine inlet was investigated to evaluate the effect of the use of this innovative approach on possible real impact events.